Letter: In brief

Sir: I congratulate you on your leader on 2 January: "Readers of The Independent ... are rational enough to be unimpressed by what is just a number and probably pedantic enough to know that the millennium does not begin until the end of the 200th year." At last a leading newspaper has had the courage to swim against the tide and acknowledge that insofar as the advent of the third millennium can be calculated at all, it certainly does not happen on 1 January 2000. Until now I had felt alone in my determination not to send Happy New Millennium cards out next December.